Once led by government agencies like NASA, the space race ecosystem is now run by private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Billions of dollars are now flowing into this hot sector, which the World Economic Forum predicts will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035.
The nascent industry isn’t just a profit opportunity, according to two space tech executives who spoke Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah. Returning to the moon is also a “moral imperative,” said Jarrett Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolabs, a planetary logistics startup that recently won a nearly $2 billion contract from NASA. “If humanity is to survive, we need to get among the stars,” he said.
Moonshot
The space tech sector’s biggest players are predictably run by two of the world’s richest men, Musk and Bezos, but new companies are springing up to build an emerging ecosystem. Rather than focusing on rockets and spacecraft like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Astrolabs is building probes capable of operating on interplanetary bodies, calling itself the “UPS of the Moon.”
Matthews said the idea is that as space technology develops, a small-scale industry of logistics will be needed to support the economies of new developments built in space. “Access to places like the moon will open up on a large scale, allowing for industrial activity,” he said.
While Astrolabs may not be a direct competitor to Blue Origin or SpaceX, another startup, Stork Space, is working on similar technology with the goal of building fully reusable rockets.
Speaking at Brainstorm Tech, Stork chief operating officer Kelly Henning acknowledged that while Stork may not be able to beat SpaceX to its goal, space observers “should vote for the small companies.” As the space landscape expands, Stork will need both large cargo companies and smaller companies, Henning said, likening Stork to the Sprinter vans used by Amazon. Stork raised $100 million in a Series B funding round in late 2023.
Sending humans back to the moon or Mars may seem like a lofty goal, but Henning said developments in space technology are rooted in solving pressing problems on Earth. He pointed to advances that space technology supports, from GPS to weather monitoring. He added that as more missions reach space, the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries will also be able to take advantage of low-gravity environments.
“Any activity that takes place in space has to benefit life on Earth,” Matthews said, “or it has no value.”
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